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November 29, 2005
Some Folks Worth Watching
There's a few of my contemporaries here in the area that I really feel are worth your time to check out:
I've already talked about Jason Arnett at length. He's a good guy, a good friend, and serious about making comix. He's always intelligent and entertaining. I'm excited that he's drawing again.
Parrish Baker's one of those quirky entities that every metropolitan area has, and is always that community's best-kept secret. Parrish sits at the Broadway Cafe and draws his comix, and leaves photocopies of them there for people to take for free. He's a legend at UMKC, as a lot of those students hang out at the cafe, none suspecting that he's sitting right there watching them read his stuff. He's infamous among the city's counter-culture and hipsters, but very few have actually met him. Oh, and his work is very genuine, very heart-felt (especially his latest, where he's working out the emotions over the death of his father), and deceptively simple. As far as I know, he doesn't really have any visions of grandeur, and would be content to keep going the way he has been.
Chris Garrett is going to be internationally acclaimed some day. I totally see him becoming the next generation to fill Dave Sim's shoes, as far as epic storytelling goes. His recent major project, The Flood, makes you just want to throw a brick through your own drawing table. He does it all very well and makes it look easy. His work ethic and level of craft makes him a real role model to me.
'Heavy Water', whose name I will some day discover, and will also meet in person eventually, just kind of exploded onto the scene a few months back. His work is very mature in its craft, and carries a sexiness and whimsical humor that make his figures really come alive. He's one big project away from going to the major leagues. I'd love to write a book for him, like a sci-fi thing, some day, but I'd probably have to beat Dennis Hopeless, his frequent collaborator, in a steel cage match or something.
Dan Spottswood is an enigma of sorts. It's funny, I actually know all of his brothers, from years before I even knew he made comix, and I was actually the manager at a gas station where one of his best friends and collaborators worked for me. But, it was only a couple years back where I finally actually met him. You know that episode of Star Trek where they go into that mirror universe where Spock has a goatee? That's Dan and I. We travel in the same circles but hardly ever meet or interact, but when we do, it's like we've known each other all our lives. Dan shares with me the same passion for the art of making comix, but we seem to have gone in completely different directions with what sort of comix we want to make. But, there's no denying that he's a hell of an artist, innovator, and writer. Hopefully some day he'll get over his own self-doubt and start shopping his Disquiet stuff around to some publishing houses, but for now you can catch him every Thursday in the Kansas City Star.
If Jason Arnett's my best friend in comix that I never get to see, then Mike Sullivan's my best friend in comix that I get to see fairly often. Mike, like Parrish, is content to keep doing what he's been doing with his work, and I think that's totally awesome. Everyone wants to dog on folks who want to do superhero stories, but I think Mike does them very well, and captures what it is about superhero stories that makes them work. His books are fun, adventurous, dangerous, well-drawn and worth every penny. He's also putting together an anthology that I think will be pretty cool once it's all said and done.
Posted by Schamberger at November 29, 2005 06:40 AM